Global Development Welcomes Geoffrey Lamb

I am very pleased to announce that Geoffrey Lamb, formerly a vice president at the World Bank, will be joining the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as senior fellow for the Global Development Program. Lamb brings an extensive wealth of knowledge and experience related to global development and partnerships. Most recently, he served as vice president, Concessional Finance and Global Partnerships at the World Bank where he was in charge of funding for the world's poorest countries and lead the bank's work on innovative financial mechanisms for global public goods, such as vaccines. Previously, he was fellow and deputy director of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex. 
 
The Global Development Program team is investing in ideas and partnerships designed to help reduce poverty and hunger and expand access to information in the developing world. To that end, we are focused on investment opportunities designed to spur agricultural development, provide financial services to the poor, and ensure libraries are avenues of equitable access for information. Earlier this month, Bill and Melinda Gates joined Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, to announce a major joint effort between the two foundations to increase the productivity of small farms in Africa with the goal of helping to move tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty and significantly reduce hunger.
 
Lamb's expertise and background will prove invaluable as the Global Development Program team continues to focus on ways to expand opportunity in developing countries. He will advise the foundation on global development strategy and work with us to build partnerships on a number of issues, from the European Union's engagement in our effort to provide free public access to the Internet in libraries in developing countries to working with ministerial leadership on our recently announced Alliance for a Green Revolution.

As senior fellow for Global Development, Lamb will join William Foege, MD, MPH, a senior fellow in Global Health. Dr. Foege advises the foundation on strategies to improve health in poor countries by developing and disseminating new drugs, vaccines, and other health solutions.

Biographical Information on Geoff Lamb
An Irish national born in South Africa, Geoff Lamb has held several senior development positions, most recently as vice president, Concessional Finance and Global Partnerships at the World Bank. In that capacity, he chaired a series of international negotiations through which governments provided the largest increase in more than two decades of World Bank funding for the world's poorest countries, and subsequently agreed on the financial framework to forgive the multilateral debt of 40 countries.

Previously in his academic career, he served as fellow and deputy director of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex. He has worked extensively in countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East.
 
Lamb was a founding member of the Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He is currently also chairman of the Board of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, a public-private partnership supporting research and development to find a safe and effective AIDS vaccine.